RE: Batch code editing (was: [GD-General] C++ analyzers?)

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

But does it do context and type sensitive changes?  Will it only change
m_uFlags to m_uEntityFlags in only those instances where's it referenced
as an entity?  Most search and replace tools, no matter how elaborate,
aren't designed to actually understand the actual code itself.

That's my beef with doing things manually.  If you change the name of a
variable you can easily find the problems by compiling and fixing
errors, but that's tedious and error prone.  Also, silent errors can get
introduced with search and replace that's done incorrectly or that
doesn't handle all cases:

int foo;
int bar;
int foobar;
int blahbar;

s&r foo -> blah

suddenly all your foo are blah, which is what you want, but now your
foobar are blahbar, which is NOT what you wanted.

It's this kind of tedium and risk that often prevents programmers from
willingly making sweeping changes that need to be done.  When there's a
global variable called "gameState" and it can/should be put into an
appropriate object, but it would require changing a zillion instances of
code and possibly conflicting with member variables called "gameState"
so that automatic tools don't do the right thing, then often programmers
just say "leave well enough alone".  And you have bad code just sitting
there.

But, more specifically, it's something that a computer should be able to
do.  In fact, it's something that computers were DESIGNED to do --
automate tedious and repetitive tasks.  It baffles me why I can't say
"Rename CFoo::update() to CFoo::fooUpdate()", which avoids the whole s&r
problem with collisions between identically or similarly named
identifiers.

The above is an active operation, however, and I would just be joyous
with passive operations that, as I mentioned in my original e-mail, show
me obvious dumb things that should be fixed, like classes defined and
never used; members defined but never used; etc.  You'd get lots of
warnings, but they'd be easy enough to fix or ignore (e.g. padding
members in structures "short dummy" or "char pad[4]", etc.)

Maybe I'm being na=EFve, but this seems like the kind of thing that =
would
be trivially easy to implement (compared to writing a compiler + IDE),
yet all we keep getting are the basic things like automatic expansion of
member variables when you type "foo->".  Hell, and that doesn't work 95%
of the time anymore in MSVC =3D|

And yes, maybe PC-Lint is the way to fix it, but damn, it sure does
look...crusty.

Brian